Transformation in Threes
by versifico
Summary: Oneshot. Because she was still just a girl when she chose a life at sea because it’s not in her nature to stay the same. Elizabeth learns about growing up, love, freedom, and the harshness of time.


Title: Transformation in Threes  
Disclaimer: Don't own anything, no attempted infringement (if that makes sense at all).  
Rating: PG  
Pairings: J/E  
Summary: Because she was still just a girl when she chose a life at sea; because it's not in her nature to stay the same. Elizabeth learns about growing up, love, freedom, and the harshness of time.  
Author's Notes: Thanks to writingsamsara for the beta read and the huge confidence boost ;) You're wonderful! Please drop me a note and let me know what you think :)

I.  
After three days she begins to feel release. It's tangible and bittersweet because she knows what good has been liberated with the bad. There will be neither corsets nor stifling teatime conversation, neither long, scented baths nor warm beds. But for this moment, for the one moment, she will think of nothing but the salty-warm lash of the wind against her chapped face. Nothing but the glint of the late-afternoon amber sunlight on the ocean rippling in their wake. She is nowhere but here, feet planted solidly on weathered wood, hands palm-up on the rail of the sweet ship, a supplication. Here I am. I am yours.

II.  
After three weeks she has learned what it's like to fall into bed with a man, her skin feeling whisper-thin and aflame with desire. She has begun to learn the nuances of her lover, of Jack, quiet truths that she never guessed at. The simple tokens of his affection for her, shared even amidst the shipmen, that alternately amuse and amaze her (an errant feather tucked into her hat, a quiet moment at the helm as he stands behind her, fingers brushing her elbow, his touch more caress then guide.) How he is wicked but never cruel, kind but never patient. She's witnessed the bright burst of his anger, sharpest when he's lost too much sleep. How he recites bits of literature without coloring or fumbling for words. She's memorized the rasp of his voice in the pre-dawn hours, when he speaks endearments against the tender skin beneath her ear.

Many days she feels very much a child, playing dress up in her rough men's clothing amidst pirates not quite so fearsome as she'd once imagined. They are only men, salted and hardened, greedy yet unexpectedly kind. She pushes her body in the daylight hours, always falling short of her own expectations. At nightfall Jack leads her to his cabin, wordlessly, and while she knows he means no harm, it chafes the same. She is struggling to find her place here, wishing no more to be known for the captain's bedmate than she did the governor's daughter.

III.  
After three months she still dreams of home, of the melt of butter-soft teacakes against her tongue and the velvet of a Persian rug beneath her bare feet. Waking she is sun-browned and grimy, flat-stomached and sinewy. She fears looking in a mirror since Jack took a dull blade to her hair some weeks ago. Although the decision was hers, she still aches to catch her fingers in the disorderly length of it, misses its wild tangle uncoiling beneath her sailor's cap.

She discovers that pirating is neither the glamorous life she yearned for nor the adventure she experienced on that first wild chase. It is sleeplessness and an aching back, hands broken and bleeding, coarse food and coarse language and violence.

Even so, she knows she will never relinquish this existence. She has woken from slumber on deck, head resting carelessly on crumpled hat, to a sky full of fiery-red and orange clouds bright enough to burn through her closed eyelids. She has endured storms that have left her breathless from their passion. She has gone for days without speaking a word, having learned that in this life cohabitation is inevitable but companionship is a choice.  
This, she thinks, is the greatest freedom yet.

III.  
After three years she understands the nature of change. She was just a girl when she chose a sailor's life. Now she is a woman, truly as fierce and changeable as the sea, aged in ways both glorious and exquisitely painful. She dreams now of the hard glint of gold and the bitter tang of blood in her mouth, wakes up with the smell of it heavy and thick in the hollows of her throat. Her freedom is captured between bow and stern, port and starboard, at the mercy of the sea's quicksilver moods.

In Jack she sees her old friend, her captain, the man that she loves. But love, she knows, is merely another mistress, capricious and unfaithful. Time has not been kind to them, has left her restless and aching for change. They've never spoken of marriage, although their unspoken accord is almost as binding. They've never wanted for passion or even compatibility (peas in a pod, love); like most things in her life, even this falls short.

On the worst of days Jack still refuses to resurrect the hard things that passed between them so long ago. Only in his unguarded moments has she caught the smoky tendrils of darkness left in him, making her pine for the girl she had been long ago, the girl that was never quite good but who was full of youth and tenderness. That girl might have taken Jack in her arms to soothe away all that was wrong between them. Instead she draws away when he reaches for her, turns her back to him on even the coldest nights. Before dawn she steals away from the warmth of his bed and finds consolation in the ship's quiet corners, alone with thoughts and daydreams not visited since her girlhood in Port Royal.

She is folding slowly into herself, running away in the only way she can, but she will not leave. She will stay, and they will crash against each other again and again, crash until she has broken both of them. She tells herself she will stay because she loves him, loves this life; maybe she will stay because it is all that she knows.


End file.
